Monday, 29 June 2009

The Australian National Data Service (ANDS) has recently launched two new services: register my data and identify my data. These services allow researchers to upload descriptions of their datasets for these to be published and to have persistent identifiers for their datasets to enable continuity of access.

ANDS also advertises on their website that they will be working with a number of research projects to assist them with their data management.

The Open Data Commons, a project from the Open Knowledge Foundation(OKF), has just released v1.0 of their Open Database licence, an open share alike licence for data and databases. It allows users to freely share, edit and use a database while maintaining freedom from other. The licence only governs the rights of the database and not the contents which in some case can be covered by other rights.

The OKF has also started a project for distributed storage called Open Data Grid for an open distributed grid for open data.

This was an excellent opportunity to confirm the extraordinary interest of librarians in this area as well as the difficulty to clarify their role and where the necessary funding comes from to allow addressing the challenge. Chris Keene shares his notes of the event from his blog and RLUK will be shortly making the presentations available.

Tuesday, 2 June 2009

Welcome to this new blog where the JISC funded Embedding Institutional Data Curation Services for Research (EIDCSR) will be reporting on project outputs and other initiatives of interest.

The EIDCSR project is an institutional collaboration in Oxford aiming to address the preservation requirements of two collaborating research groups in Oxford. Their data management and curation requirements will be scoped and selected elements of the digital curation lifecycle will be embedded, including policy, workflow, and sustainability solutions within the research process at an early stage. By joining up existing institutional and departmental services, as shown in the figure below, the project expects to use an approach that can scale up to address the data preservation challenges of research groups in Oxford.